Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to novel computer-based methods for authorship verification and authorship attribution and novel computer-based methods of using authorship verification and attribution.
Description of Related Art
In the field of authorship attribution, there have so far been three initiatives of increasing difficulty, namely, the “closed set” question, the “open set” question, and the “attribution plus verification open set” question. The closed set question asks, “Whom among a finite known (i.e., closed) set of authors was the author of a given writing?” The open set question is, “Whom among a set of authors was the author of a given writing with the understanding that the answer could be ‘none of the above’?” The more challenging question of the two questions is the latter, and the most challenging question is the ultimate open set question of verifying authorship as to only one candidate/suspect “A” but in a scenario for which the answer also could be “not A.” Closed set authorship attribution is a relatively mature field, but the open set investigations of others have not to date yielded satisfactory results despite published efforts. For example, in Luyckx, Kim, et al., “Authorship Attribution and Verification with Many Authors and Limited Data,” Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0, CNTS Language Technology Center, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium, 2008, representative of other contemporaneous prior art, the analysis presented distills to the question “is a text attributable to author A or to a definable ‘somebody else’?” and such a question itself creates the impossibility of answering the question “none of the above.” A need thus remains for computer-based authorship attribution and verification approaches that can solve open-set inquiries and also for methods of using authorship attribution and verification to reduce or solve otherwise intractable problems of daily living.
At the same time, however, the underlying authorship attribution/verification technology itself also requires innovation in the area of reliability in verifying authorship as to a single candidate, regardless of the open-set challenge. Up until now, the authorship attribution/verification technology itself has been beset in certain instances with certain potential flaws and/or unwarranted assumptions. The present invention is thus an improvement in wielding existing authorship attribution technology to function better in the open set, or “none of the above,” context and also provides fundamental improvements to underlying authorship verification approaches in profound and surprising ways.